time.russfogle.com
2026
Microcomputer, recorded performance, custom shell script, Google Docs
Time is all around us. Right this moment, your body is engulfed in electromagnetic waves broadcasting the time at 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Atomic Clock in Fort Collins, Colorado. Satellites operate similarly on the L1 band at 1.5 MHz. Computers have NTP - networked time protocol. This all travels at the speed of light: Coordinated Universal Time.
It is the synchronization of global time that makes us contemporary. The word’s Latin roots literally mean “occurring at the same time”. In “The Contemporary Condition”, researchers Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund define contemporaneity as a cluster of different historical trajectories, scales, and localities that are suddenly interconnected, rather than parallel to each other. The contemporary condition is one where we’re not just synchronized, but where it feels like everything is happening all at once. According to the World Economic Forum, the speed of current technological breakthroughs has no historical precedent, and recent developments are blurring the lines between physical, digital, and biological spheres. The Forum also indicates that technology is a leading driver of wealth inequality, hence today’s immense pressure to produce to stay afloat.
How did we get here?
Before mechanical time, time was kept via stable physical processes: the movement of the sun, the burning of a candle, the dripping of water. Time would be measured in the duration of activity: faster than cooking an egg, or longer than the walk to the next town.
In the 1300s that all changes. The first mechanical clocks are invented, with 15 minute per day accuracy, driven by weights, often ringing a bell at a specified interval.
In the 1500s - spring driven clocks, and along with them portability.
1600s - pendulum clocks, the invention of the “second”.
1700s - John Harrison’s marine chronometer. Its .2-second-per-day accuracy allows us to calculate longitude, enabling international oceanic navigation.
1927 - The first quartz clock, the invention of the millisecond.
1955 - The first cesium atomic clock - one second in 3,000 years.
1958 - Nanoseconds are invented.
1966 - Accuracy of one second in 30,000 years.
1975 - One second in 400,000 years (NBS-6).
1993 - One second in 6 million years.
1999 - We arrive at the NIST-F1 atomic clock, accurate to one second in 20 million years.
At this point the second is the most accurately defined unit of measurement, so much so that five of the other six fundamental scientific units — the kilogram, meter, ampere, kelvin and candela — are defined in part based on the second. Remember the NIST broadcast from Fort Collins? NIST-F1 is where that time comes from. And if you don’t have a shortwave radio, you can call the clock at +1 (303) 499-7111 to listen to the time
Progressively the ownership of second- and millisecond-scale time has become distributed. We can all use time to both our own benefit and detriment. I use synchronized time to video call my girlfriend. Factory time clocks have become ever more rigorous, defining task durations down to the second. Time on our phones or on our wrist can help us know when our time is being taken advantage of.
What we see now is industry taking advantage of time on the nanosecond scale. This is problematic because our own bodies are limited to, at best, a 13 millisecond reaction time. In that time, an average household computer can perform 52 million calculations. This has the potential to undermine our most fundamental concepts of causality. What happens when a computer can process inputs and inject something new into our reality before we can even process it ourselves? A current example: on the stock market, high frequency traders intercept retail purchases, buy the assets nanoseconds earlier, and resell them for a small markup.
It’s not fair to look at time deterministically, that is, that we invent the clock and therefore the clock shapes our sense of time. It’s equally true the other way around; that we require more precision in our division of time, and so we invent a tool that helps us measure and distribute it with progressively higher accuracy. And in a way, it’s all made up. Einstein’s theory of relativity proved that events can only appear simultaneous - their true order is dependent on personal frame of reference. Observers moving relative to synchronized clocks will find that they’re no longer in sync, and that what we call universal coordinated time is actually quite local.
We have the power to design the time we use. And so in an age where time can feel oppressively strict and all-encompassing, I wanted to make time a little softer and more human. Time.russfogle.com is a clock, similar in a way to NIST station WWV, broadcasting not Coordinate Universal Time, but Coordinated Personal Time. To build it, I sat at my computer and typed the time, minute by minute, into a publicly shared document. Those twenty-four hours were recorded and are now playing back in perpetuity from the computer you see pictured. You can log in at any time, from anywhere, best when viewed from your desktop or from your phone’s browser set to desktop mode. As the cursor types the time, what you’re seeing, on the other end of a long chain of bits and atoms, is me.
VIEW HERE